1. Technical Field
This invention pertains in general to online storage and management for multimedia and in particular to methods of tagging photos and videos.
2. Description of Related Art
Digital cameras have become a widespread tool for capturing photographs and videos. It is common for a typical user to own and use multiple digital cameras, such as a camera integrated into a mobile phone, a webcam attached to a home computer, a point-and-shoot camera, and a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera. It is also common for multiple users attending the same event to take photos and videos of the event from different angles and at different times. As a result, related photos and videos are saved to storage devices on many different cameras, mobile phones, and computers, and it is difficult and inconvenient for users to organize these photos and videos and share them with each other.
Some users might organize and share their photos and videos by uploading them to an online multimedia hosting service, such as FLICKR®, PHOTOBUCKET®, VIMEO®, or YOUTUBE®. Many users register for these hosting services because they wish to make their own photos and videos available to their friends and family and to view related photos and videos that were taken by others. However, content sharing methods on current hosting services are completely manual. Thus, if a user wishes to view photos and videos that were taken by other users at the event, the user must actively search for the other users and browse through their photo and video libraries to find the desired content. This makes it difficult for users to discover relevant photos and videos taken by others and efficiently share their own photos and videos with their friends and family.
Existing online multimedia hosting services provide means for a user to tag people in photographs. In general, this requires the user to manually review every photograph, identify one or more people in the photograph, and add one or more tags to identify the people in the photograph. This can be a time consuming and tedious process even for relatively small collections of photographs. Various algorithms and services exist for identifying people in images based on facial recognition, such as the services available from FACE.COM®. However, use of facial recognition algorithms for photo tagging has been limited due to the lack of reliability of existing algorithms to accurately and consistently identify people. One notable limitation of existing algorithms is a lack of reliability in correctly distinguishing between close relatives, such as siblings. This raises particular concerns for image tagging applications, because parents, for example, may have hundreds or thousands of pictures of each of their children, who may closely resemble each other and who parents want to tag in their image collections.